Artist: BOaT
Song: Goodbye my Strange Number 28
From album: Listening Suicidal
Genre: Sedimentary Rock
[Buy CD(2)][Website]

Short on time, long on things to do. I’m drinking green tea straight from the pot, it’s like a giant mug of keep working. So this will be brief.

Here’s BOaT again. A song that piles up in layers like years of experience, and unravels like giving up all your grudges.

What does it sound like to you?

Artist: Uri Gagarn
Song: Resistor
From album: ? ? (no title)
Genre: Minimal Indie Impression Conduit
[Buy CD][Website]

To me this song, and to some extent the video, sounds like it was made underground; like it’s the bubbling internal conflict of a man imprisoned in solitary confinement with only trace elements of hope and a burning regret or uncertainty.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be in solitary confinement. We spend so much time scrambling for survival, to learn to work in order to make money to eat in order to stay alive in order to go to work again. In all this seemingly meaningful (pre)occupation we don’t have much time to think and ponder meaningfully. Our thinking comes in short bursts like automatic weapons, rarely in long trains of thought slowly meandering through the hills. I am tempted to think that it wouldn’t be so bad to have everyday to meditate on ideas, to think things through completely from every angle, in a sense to really know what I think.

Of course, for most people that end up in solitary confinement involuntarily there will be an element of internal conflict that could turn the time into torture. With no external input, no external answers, one can only look to oneself to find or create a meaning for things.

This song sounds like that to me: a struggle of the mind longing to find within itself an answer for things outside of it, and a reason for its place among them.

Artist: Number Girl
Song: Zegen Vs Undercover
From album: Sappukei
Genre: Id-Rock
[Buy this Album][Website][Keikaku Profile]

Number Girl is an absolute indie force.

It’s simultaneously tragic and liberating that some of the most profound experiences in life either require, or engender, a paradigm shift. They aren’t accessible to everyone, just those accidentally on the cusp. It’s my opinion that Number Girl, like Downy, and much underground music, has a similar, if not parallel requirement. To fully appreciate this [very great] album/band, you may need to acquire or bring with you a disillusionment with the pretenses of human conduct, and a willingness to burrow down into hotter, darker, and more membranous strata.

Good times.

Artist: Hikaru Tanimoto ?????
Song: Thanks to Music!!
From album: Thanks to Music!!
Genre: Guitaristry
[Buy CD][Website]

This Hikaru Tanimoto fellow seems to be riding his song like a furry dog-dragon thing à la The Neverending Story (It’s the innocent glee and over-excitement that evokes the comparison.). He seems almost too joyful and excited to be playing it himself; yet, empirical evidence suggests that he really is.

At first it’s hard to believe that all the sounds are coming from one kid and one guitar. You hear it pouring out in thick layers like cake-batter, and he’s upending the bowl, licking his lips. He seems giddy with almost surprised love for each note that appears as he flys by them. It’s a joy so devoid of self-consciousness, a delight, not in the fact that he plays music, but in the idea that music itself exists.

I thought it refreshing.